The Cost Of My Freedom

by Gregory Battle

The cost of my freedom has never been an extended credit line given by J.P. Morgan and Chase,
or a life-long donation from the Gates Foundation into a personal PayPal account,
or a trust-fund established in perpetuity by Edward A. Jones,
or a low-interest loan granted by name-only from the Bank of America;
instead the cost of my freedom was earned in the gut-curdling screams of unruly slaves pinioned within chains often tethered
to skin-scraped poles or hemorrhaging bark while being whipped by brutal overseers into sadistic humiliation;
the cost of my freedom was the finance of fettered field hands who baked often in 100-degree sunshine; who
sweated out then fainted carrying endless loads of corn and cotton; who moaned with rotten gums and teeth
broken under the yokes of vile hegemony across Southern clay; the cost of my freedom was the bounty of
defiant dark-hued spirits branded in malevolence by insatiable masters who ignored their shredded tongues
and muted voices crying for mercy; the cost of my freedom is unmarked Mississippi mounds whose berth of
unclaimed warrior bones still rock the ground in tribal chords cluttering in the magma of revolution;
the cost of my freedom has become the faint ledgers of great great aunts and uncles who dared to read;
who shared star-lit dreams beneath leaky tin-roofs; who ran North and shivered in Artic glaciers;
who soaked in fire hoses and marched relentless miles on calloused feet for equality; who drank from fountains
that were colored in a despairing geography of racist mountains; the cost of my freedom was forged in
the undaunted transactions of Parks, Shuttlesworth, Evers, Till, Carmichael and King ---- who flustered,
who encouraged, who endured, who envisioned that beyond the barks of hounds and behemoth swamps,
a shining land of liberty would assuage them, ever rightfully blemish them in Almighty Hope; the cost
of my freedom is a haunting, historic bridge of skeletal ivory strewn across the Atlantic launched in
munity from the bows of traders ships; the cost of my freedom has been the bounty of rhetoric and booming
rocketry from Douglass, Baldwin, Malcom, Newton , Brown, Turner and Mays; the cost of my freedom is a
tendered Torch that only Truth can set ablaze; the cost of my freedom is a currency of bold caprice,
promise, old wounds, scars and inexorable triumph that can never be phrased!